Although electronic calendar systems for storing reminders and creating contacts with others about meeting times and locations provide one type of opportunity for people to collaborate, a great deal of collaboration is based on opportunistic communication arranged under uncertainty. This informal coordination between people often depends on peoples' shared understandings about current and future locations and activities of friends and associates. Even with employment of online group calendar systems, for example, people are often challenged with trying to understand how available others are for a respective collaboration such as knowing what the current status of someone they are trying to contact. However, knowing a person's current status does not necessarily facilitate future or desired collaboration between communicating parties.
In just one example, conventional e-mail systems provide an example of communications and message coordination difficulties between parties. In one possible scenario, an employee may be situated in a foreign country or remote region, wherein voice communications via telephone or other medium is not always possible. The employee may have indicated beforehand to fellow workers, supervisors and loved ones that e-mail provides the most reliable manner in which the employee will actually receive and be able to subsequently respond to a message. Although, conventional e-mail systems can indicate that a transmitted message has been received and opened by the employee, and can include a predetermined/pre-configured reply such as “On vacation for one week”, or “Out of the office this afternoon”—assuming the employee remembers to configure the e-mail system, there is currently no automatically generated indication provided to the message sender when and/or how long it will be before the employee may actually respond. Thus, if a home crisis situation were to occur or an important business message needed to get through, message senders can only guess when the employee will potentially receive the message and hope that the message is received and responded to in a timely manner. Similar difficulties arise when attempting to schedule meetings with parties that are difficult to determine whether or not they can attend a meeting set for some time in the future.
As is common in everyday situations, messages are transmitted with varying degrees of urgency, importance, and priority. Often, key meetings need to be arranged at a moments notice in order to address important business or personal issues. Consequently, one or more messages are directed to one or more parties to indicate the urgency of the meeting. Also, messages are often communicated over multiple communications modalities in order to attempt to reach potential parties. For example, a business manager may send e-mails to key parties and follow the e-mail with phone calls, pages or faxes to the parties, wherein voice mails are typically left for non-answering parties. Unfortunately, the manager is often unsure whether non-responding parties have received the messages and is often unable to determine with any degree of confidence when all parties may be available to meet. Therefore, even though modem communications systems have enabled messages to be rapidly transmitted anywhere in the world over a plurality of mediums, there is a need for a system and methodology to provide improved coordination, communication, and collaboration between parties and to mitigate uncertainty associated with when and/or how long it will be before a message recipient receives a particular message.